Building The Net

Signs of a failing Hard Drive.

Do you know what piece of computer hardware is the most likely component to fail? If you answered the hard drive, you’re absolutely correct! Why? It’s one of the few moving parts left in a computer. With a hard drive, it’s not if it will fail, it’s when!

So, we know it’s going to fail. What can we do to:

• Protect our data from loss.
• Predict when a hard drive will fail.
• Recover from a failure.

Read more »

We have received reports that the CryptoLocker ransom-ware is becoming more prolific every day.

CryptoLocker ransom-ware is a malware program that when ran, will search all connected drives on your Windows PC, and then using strong public/private key encryption, proceeds to encrypt all of your data files it can find.

What it does:

Once it is done encrypting all the data files it can find, it will delete the private portion of the encryption key, and present the user with a popup. This popup informs the user that they have been infected and must pay $300 dollars via Bitcoin to receive the key to regain access to the data.

Read more »

The temptation of the cloud…

In today’s everything digital world, it seems like a natural thing to store your data where you can get to it from anywhere. But who is insuring that all those photos, contacts, videos, calendar entries, and other digital info will be there in ten years? Or in five years? Or even next year? Actually, who is making sure it will be there and accessible tomorrow? With Microsoft/Danger’s announcement of a total data storage failure on the T-Mobile Sidekick Network:

Read more »

Who’s really behind the idea.

First off, let me be clear that this was not my idea. I was told about this whole concept by Mike Rubel @ Cal Tech. He’s the rocket scientist behind this whole idea. Now that we have our “Credit Where Credit is Due” portion out of the way, let’s get into the whole rsync backup concept.

Read more »

With hotter temperatures, your electronics are at higher risk of failure. Are you backed up?

If you’ve been around electronics for any period of time, you know that as the weather gets hotter, equipment failure rates also climb. With the increased use of digital cameras and digital video, as well as all the other information we store on our digital devices, the failure of any electronic device could result in information loss.

Here are some quick tips that might save you from having to deal with data loss. Let’s just call them words to live by in a digital world.

Read more »